Blue Note New York
Shabaka with special guest Charles Overton

    $20 Minimum Per Person
    Full Bar & Dinner Menu
    NO REFUNDS OR EXCHANGES.

    • All seating is first come, first served. 
    • Bar Area seating is limited and first come first served. When all available seats are occupied, the remaining bar area is standing room only.
    • Table Seating is all ages, Bar Area is 21+. Bar Area tickets for patrons under 21 will not be honored. 
    Group Reservations:
    • Groups larger than 10 must purchase a group package at club@bluenote.net, or by calling 212.475.8592.
    • Groups larger than 10 without a group package will be subject to group surcharges added to your bill. 
    • Groups arriving late or separately are not guaranteed to be seated together. All seating is first come, first served. Arrive early for best seats.
    Tickets for Blue Note New York shows are only available for purchase on Ticketweb. We are not affiliated with any third-party sellers. Tickets purchased on third-party sites will not be honored. The credit card used for original purchase of tickets will be required at the door upon entry.
     
     

    • Shabaka Hutchings

      Perceive its Beauty, Acknowledge its Grace by multi-instrumentalist Shabaka Hutchings is, in a sense, a debut album. And yet, the album also serves as a reintroduction to the artist, a levitating, stunning work chock full of the lessons he’s learned over the course of his life and career. And perhaps, most importantly, it represents the spirit of exploration that the artist is most tapped into these days.
       
      London-born, Hutchings spent much of his childhood in Barbados. Beginning at age nine, he studied the clarinet, playing in calypso bands while studying classicalrepertoire, often practicing over hip hop beats by artists such as Nas, as well as to the music native to Barbados. He imparted that at the time, “The idea of being a particular ‘type’ of musician who limited themselves by genre was totally alien to me and my peers, it was just about playing with skill and dedication, and whether music moved me or left me cold.”
       
      Consequently, after studying clarinet at Guildhall School of Music from 2004-2008, he collaborated on a kaleidoscopic range of projects:recording and/or touring with Mulatu Astatke and the Heliocentrics, Soweto Kinch, Floating Points and Courtney Pine amongst many other bands, as well as being a part of the London Improvisers Orchestra. He’s alsocomposed pieces for the BBC Concert Orchestra, London Sinfonietta, Ligeti Quartet, and performed the Copland Clarinet Concerto with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Britten Sinfonietta as well as the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra.
       
      Over the course of the past decade, the lion’s share of his touring and recorded work has been with three bands:Sons of Kemet, The Comet is Coming and Shabaka and the Ancestors. “In these formations,” he shared,“I’ve been able to display a fundamental approach to creative practice in different contexts spanning Afro-Caribbean fusion, London dance music club culture and the rich South African jazz tradition - all within the freedom afforded by the legacy of the American ‘jazz’ tradition.” That approach reflects a mantra he absorbed early in his life.
       
      “My primary school teacher told me ‘the music isn’t hard, just practice it mechanically then relax and let your soul shine through’. This is an adage which I’ve kept throughout my life of learning how the musics and instruments of different cultures relate to my personal vision of sound.”
       
      His musical exploration includes employing a variety of flutes, including the ancient Japanese Shakuhachi, which he started playing in 2020 during the pandemic. “Since then, it has slowly changed the scope of my musical inner landscape and drawn me towards a multitude of other instruments in the flute family,” he explained.“As more flutes have been added to my arsenal including Mayan Teotihuacan drone flutes, Brazilian Pifanos, Native American flutes and South American Quenas, I’ve started to appreciate the underlying principles that cause these instruments to resonate most fully and use this understanding to form a concept allowing me to freely move between instruments.”
       
      On New Year’s Day 2023, in the wake of the release of his 2022 debut EP, Afrikan Culture (which notably featured the artist primarily on flutes), Shabaka announced that beginning in 2024 he’d take a hiatus from playing the saxophone publicly. He clarified in July 2023 on his Instagram page his intention to cease playing with bands in which the saxophone was his primary instrument (including The Comet Is Coming, Sons of Kemet and Shabaka and the Ancestors).
       
      For the flute-forward album Perceive its Beauty, Acknowledge its Grace, Hutchings tapped into a remarkable cadre of players, including percussionist Carlos Niño and bassist Esperanza Spalding. Vocalists including Saul Williams and Lianne La Havas contributed to “Managing My Breath, What Fear Had Become”and “Kiss Me Before I Forget”, respectively. Floating Points, with whom Shabaka shared a stage with for their performance of Promises at the Hollywood Bowl, provided additional production on the track “I’ll Do Whatever You Want".
       
      “I invited a bunch of musicians I’ve met and admired over the past few years of touring throughout the United States to collaborate and everyone said yes, which I constantly find breathtaking,” he disclosed. His aim was to gather the musicians at Rudy Van Gelder’s historic studios, which he says “informed the sound of so many seminal jazz albums that have shaped my musical aptitude. We played with no headphones or separation in the room so we could capture the atmosphere of simply playing together in the space without a technological intermediary. After recording hours of inspired interactions, I set to work producing an album from the material.”
       
      When asked about the meaning of the song’s titles, he explained that his previous album’s song titles can be read as poems, respectively. “The narrative aspect of my albums is always intentional,” he explained.“Around the release of the Shabaka and the Ancestors album We Are Sent Here by History, I coined the term ‘sonic poems’ to express how I’m intending the listener to relate to the words associated with the sounds contained on the disc. Each title on this disc was extracted from a longer poem written specifically for the album which only achieved its full meaning in the presence of the music.”
      He further relayed that “How the listener interprets the words in relation to the sounds is personal and it’s this subjective unravelling of complex ideas that’s an integral part of the journey I intend to take the listener on. This idea permeated sons of Sons of Kemet’s Black to the Future album whereby each track title reads as a poem. Perceive its Beauty, Acknowledge its Grace follows in this tradition of titles as symbolising a narrative which is necessarily subjective and expansive in relation to the listener’s experience with the heard music.”
       
      --Ayana Contreras
       
    • Charles Overton

      Equally at home in an orchestra or in a jazz club, Boston-based harpist Charles Overton aims to create a musical environment that is accessible, exciting, and resonates deeply with audiences.

      Overton performs frequently with the Boston Symphony as both a second and substitute harpist, this past season joining them on a week-long tour to Japan. Highlights in chamber music include three summers performing at the Yellow Barn Summer Music Festival, as well as concerts with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Castle of Our Skins, the Walden Chamber Players, and the Chamber Music Society of Central Virginia. He has performed as a soloist with New England ensembles including the Cape Cod Chamber Orchestra, Boston Civic Symphony and Boston Landmarks Orchestra. Also an avid jazz musician, he appears regularly in clubs all over the northeast, including Jimmy’s, Scullers, the Regattabar, and Le Poisson Rouge, as both leader and sideman.

      Originally from Richmond, VA, he began his musical journey with formative experiences with the American Youth Harp Ensemble and the Interlochen Arts Academy before moving to Boston in 2012 to expand his musical horizons at the Berklee College of Music. During his studies he attended orchestra festivals like the Pacific Music Festival and the Tanglewood Music Center, and also became immersed in the world of jazz and improvised music, owing much of his outlook on music to lessons from the renowned artist-faculty of the Berklee Global Jazz Institute.

      Overton currently serves on the faculty of the Boston Conservatory at Berklee, and is actively writing and arranging new music for upcoming projects.

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